Since April, I’ve worked in a customer support leadership role in financial technology. My team handles the occasional frustrated customer, manages the situation with care, and does whatever we can to both resolve the issue and de-escalate the situation.
But during weeks like this past one, when a customer goes nuclear, the hope of de-escalation dwindles with each email.
I was in a conference room with a colleague, trying to put out the fire. Usually, just getting someone on a Zoom takes the temperature down; we’re all bolder behind a keyboard. Not this time. He came out of the gate hot as can be. Rolling his eyes. Throwing his hands up with every sentence. Cussing at us for not doing things his way.
That shut me down. I was lost. My jaw clenched, my hands started shaking, and all I could eke out was, "I understand the frustration here, but our policy stands. There are certain things we can do, can't do, and choose not to do."
What I wanted to say was, “Slow your roll. You’re overreacting for absolutely zero reason. If you’d read my email and not blown up, we wouldn’t be here.”
We talked past each other for another twenty minutes. I thanked the customer for his time and said we’d follow up on any product ideas we’d pass to the team, and ended the call.
I looked at my colleague and said, “Well, that just happened. I didn’t expect that.”
The problem still isn’t resolved. And every time I think about him, no matter where I am, I’m back in that room.
This brought up the quintessential customer service conundrum:
How do we stay patient with difficult people?
I tried to find that answer in my 1-on-1 meeting with my leader, in peer conversations with the success manager on the call, and by googling as much as I could to tackle it from an operational standpoint.
That’s when God, in His loving ways, caught me by the collar.
When we look at other people as the problem, like how that question frames the customer I dealt with, it gives us a way out. I’m not the problem here; they are. We end up forgetting that we, too, are just as messy as they are and aren’t totally innocent in the equation. Yes, they’re difficult, but so am I. My temper flared. My selfishness and desire for safety reared its head in my heart.
So, the real question, when we distill the self-preservation, emotions, and offense out of the equation, is quite different:
What is my patience for, when it buys nothing?
I found my answer to this question in an unlikely place.
First Peter 2:18–23 reads:
18 Household slaves, submit to your masters with all reverence not only to the good and gentle ones but also to the cruel. 19 For it brings favor if, because of a consciousness of God, someone endures grief from suffering unjustly. 20 For what credit is there if when you do wrong and are beaten, you endure it? But when you do what is good and suffer, if you endure it, this brings favor with God.
21 For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. 22 He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth; 23 when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.
I asked myself the same question you’re thinking now: how does a passage directed to slaves apply at all to someone getting under your skin?
Schreiner addresses this objection: “The exhortation is addressed to slaves, but slaves function as examples for all Petrine Christians [those going through situations where they have little control], and so the principle enunciated applies to all believers.”1 You can’t control how other people act; you can only maintain your own witness and composure. Schreiner continues this train of thought in saying that the “New Testament writers concentrate on the godly response of believers to mistreatment.”2
Let me pause here and add this contextual delineation. Peter’s whole aim in this first letter to the “dispersed exiles” (1 Pet. 1:1) is to bolster the faith and resolve of those who were hated and persecuted for their belief in Jesus, all right before a period of even deeper and harsher oppression.3 You’re probably not being oppressed, persecuted, or denied opportunity because you’re a Christian in 2026. You’re probably just getting your feelings hurt because someone disagreed with you or you didn’t really have the qualifications you needed to move up at work.
The world of today is nowhere near as hostile for believers as the world of 1 Peter. My week was not a case of persecution or oppression; it was merely a bad call with a customer who probably won’t think about me after his problem is solved.
At the heart of this passage, in vv. 21-23, Peter invokes Isaiah 53’s Suffering Servant motif to demonstrate the example that we’re supposed to follow. Davids unpacks this idea and shows us this isn’t just a copy/paste keystroke: “The theme of following Christ or imitating Christ is common in the NT and (shifting to the theme of imitating an appropriate teacher) in the Hellenistic world, but the vocabulary used here is unique. The term for ‘example’ is not simply that of a good example that one is exhorted to copy, but the pattern letters that a school child must carefully trace if he or she will ever learn to write.”4
And if Christ is the pattern after which we should follow, then it stands to reason that if he could put up with the most intense form of persecution, we can exercise patience in the times when it would be easier to stand up for ourselves and our own rights. After all, as Charles Spurgeon, the “prince of preachers,” notes, “The giving up of what is our right, the giving up of what we may fairly claim as our own, is the very mark of Christ’s sheep.”5
This is where Redemptive Correlation comes into play. The customer support question here doesn’t get answered the way other areas of my job can: better canned replies or workflows, firmer boundaries, or clearer policies. Not as a believer, because those tools don’t reach. I have to pull it under Scripture’s authority, culture read through Scripture and never the other way around, and let it come back as a different question.
The first recorded human words in Scripture are recognition of another image bearer: “This one, at last, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam saw a someone.
And that’s how God designed all of this to work. He made us so that we’re to be face-to-face, not taken advantage of or used as a means.
Which is why that call really got under my skin. I was treated as a mechanism, and that structural violation of who God designed us to be went beyond just a workplace annoyance.
Not even two chapters later, the one who recognized became the one who used. He offloaded what should’ve been his responsibility to bear, saying, “The woman you gave to be with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate” (Gen. 3:12). One sentence, and Adam handed the blame for his sin to his wife and billed God for giving him a helper.
That’s where a particular type of entitlement was born. It screamed, “This is yours to carry, not mine.” It’s the type of entitlement we don’t recognize right away, because we’re so used to the type that demands more than it deserves.
Cain finishes what his dad started and adds further definition to this type of entitlement. He says to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9) when Abel is nowhere to be found, because Cain murdered him. In modern language, he said, “That’s not my job.” He refused the burden.
In my world, my customer was running Adam’s play: “Fix it, and fix it now.” But what I was running was Cain’s. I quietly calculated how much of him I was actually obligated to carry.
Verse 23 has one verb that undoes the whole question we’ve been looking at.
23 when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.
Entrusted. Peter tells us that Christ handed the whole account over to his Father and let him handle things. He didn’t just suck it up and wait for the payout.
That’s a different thing than patience. We often view patience as a deferred collection of what’s owed to us. We hold our tongues, keep score, and tell ourselves we’re being gracious all while tallying up the slights in the back of our minds.
Jesus didn’t do that before Pilate, and we need to understand that’s not what he’s asking of me or you on a support call.
So: what is my patience for, when it buys nothing?
That’s still the wrong question. Patience isn’t for anything. When it’s for something, whether it’s favor, formation, or the guy backing down on the other end of the call, you’re back in the transaction mindset without any progress.
Peter does say enduring unjust suffering brings favor with God (v. 20), but the phrase really is closer to, “This is commendable in God’s sight,” rather than, “This earns you credit.” It’s a Father’s assessment of what he’s looking at, not a balance accruing in your bank account.
Ask what your patience bought, and you’ve already misread the transaction. The receipt was never yours to hold.
When Peter talks about “the one who judges justly,” he’s not giving us a consolation prize. It’s actually a promise. He’s saying that the ledgers get balanced by the only one who can actually make sense of the accounting and do something about it.
You don’t have to be your own lawyer when you’re mistreated. You aren’t a neutral party to your own case, and neither am I.
What we’re working towards is a world where there’s nothing left to pay back. No outstanding balances, no IOUs, and not even an eye-for-an-eye waiting. Forbearance will be obsolete because no one takes anything from anyone. No more calculating how much you can take before pushing back is allowed.
When you hand over the ledger now, you’re running a dress rehearsal for that world.
You may not be on the other end of escalated calls like I was this week. But you have someone.
It might be a friend who calls to complain to you about their life, but never cares about yours. Or a coworker who lingers too long at your desk after a conversation you didn’t have time for in the first place. Or someone in your small group who treats it like their personal weekly therapy or vent sessions.
You do what I did. You stay calm, but you keep score.
I’m not going to tell you to just be more patient. That’s the easy route here. What you and I both need to actually do is stop counting.
Your receipt-keeping may be accurate. It’s also a refusal to believe anyone is going to settle the account.
It’s okay to name what happened as wrong, because Peter does in v. 19 when he calls it suffering unjustly. Jesus denying his right to speak up in front of those accusing him wasn’t him claiming nothing was happening to him.
You can name it, but you have to hand it over and let go. Tell the truth about the wrongdoing, then put down the notebook and the pen.
Try to do this in the smallest form possible. No reliving the conversation over and over in your head in the shower, or building a case, or typing out the reply to that text message in your Notes app. Hand it over and go do something else.
It’s okay if you don’t do it perfectly the first, second, or tenth time. I’ll admit, every time I thought about the phone call and prayed for the customer who was rude to me, it didn’t take me long before I was back to litigating my own case.
Here’s what I have to relearn, almost daily.
The church is full of people who know everything there is to know about forgiveness, but they still hold accounts open on someone who did them dirty back in 2013. We know all the verses, stories, commands, and promises about forgiving others as Christ forgave us, but we still carry that ledger around in our back pockets, ready to use it, no matter if there’s one little line or pages full.
This is orthodoxy without orthopraxy. Again.
We’re supposed to look like a man who was insulted, but didn’t clap back. The truth is that we mostly don’t when we look in the mirror. Sure, we believe it, but we don’t practice it in the mundane, ordinary areas of our lives. But those small places are the only places where practice happens. The mad boss. The terse email. The customer who will never think about you again.
We’re rehearsing for a world where none of this will be necessary. Every account we close early is a small, stubborn advertisement for heaven.
So, whose ledger are you still keeping?
This post is an example of the original theological method I've developed called Redemptive Correlation: reading the world through Scripture, not being the Bible to fit our culture. If this struck a note with you, I'd appreciate you subscribing (which is completely free) and supporting my writing.
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Thomas R. Schreiner, 1-2 Peter and Jude, ed. E. Ray Clendenen and Brandon D. Smith, Christian Standard Commentary (Holman Reference, 2020), 148.
Schreiner, 1-2 Peter and Jude, 150.
Many scholars date the letter’s writing to the early 60’s A.D., right before the Neronian persecution began. See Peter H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990), 10; Schreiner, 1-2 Peter and Jude, 19.
Davids, The First Epistle of Peter, 109–110.
Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon Commentary: 1 Peter, ed. Elliot Ritzema and Jessi Strong, Spurgeon Commentary Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 1 Pe 2:23.